Daring to be different

Tyra Banks, host of “America’s Next Top Model” for more than a decade, has been a champion of both the traditional and the nontraditional.

Less traditional: She stopped audience voting because they favored more typical or conventional types of models while she wanted a more diverse range of beauty.

“Some of us understand that quirky is cool, that freckles are cool, that a gap is cool in teeth, that eyes that are far apart are cool or a big forehead is cool,” she says. “But the majority of the population doesn’t.”

More traditional: Banks famously reads contracts. Asked how her life would be different if she’d not been beautiful, she says she’d have earned a berth with the super-rich.

“Because I have a personal brand, I have to worry about all this personal-image crap,” she says. “I am constantly saying no to things because of it. If I didn’t, child, I think I’d be in the billionaires’ club.”